“Found” time

One of the perks of waking up too early is that one has time to clean one’s fingernails! 

It is always a series of events that brings on “found” time. In the case of clean fingernails it was eating out with the son who doesn’t drink as much water: last night I ordered the usual bottle of water and only realized halfway through the meal that we hadn’t drunk any of it (with son 2 we would have already re-ordered). What is ordered needing to be paid I started drinking it and the predictable end result was needing to get up and go to the bathroom at 5 this morning. Tried to ignore my full bladder, unsuccessfully so had to arise at 5:45 at which point of course one isn’t going back to sleep.

However, the positive side was time to not only clean my fingernails but to also water all the houseplants and tidy up various piles of papers.

This led me to the thought of “found” time and how precious it is. “Found” time is any time for which one had plans (i.e. sleeping in this case) that fall through creating a period of time (and if one is extremely lucky hours or even a day) with no constraints or schedule.

Regardless of what one eventually fills that time with, it is always a pleasure as a perk, something unexpected. The cancellation of an appointment in town often gains one a half if not whole day – a day to either read, go for a walk, sort out a drawer, work on one’s current hobby project.

It lightens the spirit to have a planned event fall through leaving time to be enjoyed in another manner: of course this is not true if the planned event was lunch with a friend and they have to cancel due to the flu, even so it can be used positively and with great pleasure.

Hmmm…. The flip side: if there is “found” time, there must be its opposite “lost” time, but I won’t worry about that for the moment, I was happy enough to have my “found” time today.